Re: Collective nouns

On 12/19/05, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> Senjecan has a suffix, -îjos, for making collective nouns out of
> count nouns.  A few examples:
>
> alûn-es (dove) + îjos = álunîjos, flock of doves.
gjâ-zym-byn has no plural inflection, but it does
have some derivational affixes for collectives:

-daj   collection or mass of X in one place
-zla   the whole set of X everywhere
-cu    a system in which many X work together as parts
-kwĭ   an ordered series of X

E.g.,

pwĭm "water"
-> pwĭm-daj  "body of water"
mâ "person"
-> mâ-zla "humanity, the human race" (cf. Esperanto "homaro")
-> mâ-daj  "crowd of people"
-> mâ-cu  "company, club, church, etc"
-> mâ-kwĭ  "queue, group of people standing in line"

(If Unicode doesn't come through, ĭ is supposed to be i-breve.)

I think Ithkuil has an even larger set of distinct plural/collective
derivations.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm
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